1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to shipping printed material, and in particular, to a system and method for creating an efficient shipping strategy for shipping the printed material.
2. Description of Related Art
Production printing systems generally have a modular design in which various parts of the printing system perform differing tasks. One part may feed printing media, e.g., paper, into a print path. As the media travels along the print path, the printing system utilizes the paper. One such part, or printing module, is the print engine module. The print engine module marks each piece of the media appropriately based off of either static or dynamic image data. For example, a printing system may be tasked to print 500 copies of a book that includes a particular page with a picture and a custom message below the picture. The picture may be of a character of the book and the message may be directed to an anticipated purchaser of the book. For example, if Tom Smith bought a book, the message may state, “This is Tom Smith's book”. The picture can be referred to as static print data while the message can be referred to as variable print data.
A printing system tasked to print variable print data is engaged in variable data printing. Other types of variable data printing may include printing serial print jobs in which the stock or media changes between successive print jobs. In addition, another type of variable data printing is printing different mailing or packaging labels for placing on (or in) a shipping container prior to transferring that portion of the print job to a shipping carrier.
Multiple customers of the owner(s) of the printing system may submit these successive print jobs. Generally, these customers are located remotely to the facilities of the printing system and can design and submit a print job therefrom. For example, it is common for the customer to have custom software that can submit image data, such as image data contained in a page description language file, along with a job ticket (this submission process is sometimes referred to as ticketing). The job ticket can include relevant information, such as the stock type desired and other information associated with the image data, the customer or the like.
Generally, near the printing station a key-op collects the print jobs and prepares them for shipping. The key-op usually prepares the shipping label by manually entering in shipping information and guesses as to which shipping container(s) to use. The key-op then gives the packaged portion of the printed print job to the shipping carrier to arrive at the customer's preferred destination. Because of the variability of the printed print job within the print jobs and/or between successive print jobs, it is difficult for the key-op to select optimal shipping parameters, e.g., which carrier to use and which shipping container to select.
Additionally, the key-op may introduce additional inefficiencies when preparing the print job for shipping. For example, the key-op generally has to weigh each portion of the printed print job and determine which box has sufficient tear strength, dimensions and carrying capacity before selecting the shipping container. The key-op has to wrap each portion, place that portion into a shipping container (e.g., a box) and then use adhesive tap to complete the packaging. After the label(s) are printed and affixed, the packaged portion of the print job may need additional weighing because additional weight is added by the wrapping, the packaging, the shipping container, the labeling and the adhesive tape. The postage needs to conform to the actual shipping weight or the postage paid may be too high or too low.